Can the ‘archaeology of Europe’ survive postprocessual euroscepticism?

Extract

In the title of his paper Professor Kristiansen poses a question that turns out to be affirmatively rhetorical. One could surely be forgiven for reading the title and thinking that this eminent European and europeanist prehistorian had lobbed his own grenade of doubt into a discipline which, despite occasional protestations, has long assumed Europe to be a real place, a legitimate geographical context. In truth, it is not really a surprise that Professor Kristiansen asserts that we need to be more European, not less, in our thinking, but what is a surprise (to me, anyway) is the pathway he lays down towards that conclusion. His observations about the relationship between heritage/conservation issues on the one hand, and the shift from positivism to postprocessualism in archaeological theory on the other, are certainly thought-provoking, as are the results of his survey of linguistic and citation trends in recent archaeological literature, but have they a natural home in this particular argument? If yes, is his argument in favour of a greater ‘European-ness’ of enquiry the natural outcome of invoking them?